Public administration education in CEE countries: Institutionalization of a discipline

The array of public affairs programs has been growing in the past 27 years in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Traditionally, public administration programs concentrated primarily on legal and formal institutional aspects of governing, whereas public policy and management programs were entirely absent and remain relatively new. This article discusses the contents of the MPA/MPP programs in five CEE countries (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia) in order to identify major features in terms of the disciplinary and methodological character of these programs. Our ultimate question is to assess whether these programs reveal a clear, relatively robust public administration “identity,” and whether there is a convergence among programs in the region towards the so-called mainstream programs in the world.